2017 Reel Music Awards – The Nominations

It’s that time of the year where Reel Music takes a look back at the year just passed to celebrate some of the ‘stand-out’ scores of 2017. As with 2016, I thought 2017 was another good year for film, television and videogame music. From the major Hollywood blockbusters through to the more modest low budget endeavours, there was a high level of quality in the music being composed and hopefully my Reel Music Award nominations highlights some of the great music on offer.

Over the course of the year I have been giving numerical values to all of the scores that I have listened to and making a few notes to act as memory jogs for this end-of-year summary. Towards the end of 2017 I began a review process to shortlist my stand-out lists. The titles listed below are my Top 10* titles that I have enjoyed most and are divided into a number of different categories. It’s difficult to articulate the decision process for choosing the various scores: there’s no formal mechanism, it’s how the music makes me feel both as a separate listening experience and – if I am lucky – how the music sits within the medium for which it was written. As with previous years, many worthy titles have, unfortunately, had to be put to one side and don’t feature in my selections: the nominations for the documentary and videogame categories were particularly difficult to choose.

Unfortunately, these ‘awards’ offer no trophies and the announcements of winners will not take place in some glittering venue, but are just a way of showcasing some of the scores released in 2017 that I feel are particularly worthy of celebrating. The various category winners and my overall choice of ‘score of 2017’ will be announced on Monday, 5th February 2018.

*Note: where there were limited numbers of releases in particular categories, five titles were nominated rather than the usual ten.